Everyone wants metrics and key performance indicators to prove things are going well. But when it comes to value, that can sometimes be difficult to quantify. In security, it can be especially hard to tell when an organization is performing well. I often say, “When security is going well, nobody notices.”

Security teams struggle with a lack of clear metrics as they’re rightly focused on protecting the business. That’s why ServiceNow commissioned Forrester Consulting to put real numbers behind the value provided by ServiceNow Security Operations.

The end result is a January 2018 study called The Total Economic Impact™ of ServiceNow Security Operations. In this study, Forrester interviewed three current Security Operations customers to understand how they’re using and benefitting from the solution. These customers, which were used to develop a composite organization, faced a few key challenges, including:

• Manual processes that hindered response times
• Limited visibility into security posture
• High costs associated with manual security response

Sound familiar? These challenges weren’t surprising when we see figures from the Ponemon Institute indicating organizations are taking as much as eight months to find and contain data breaches[1]. Security teams are understaffed and overwhelmed by alerts and vulnerabilities.

They need to move faster to keep up with a rapidly changing threat landscape, and one way to do that is by automating manual processes, which was the number one benefit identified by Forrester. Both security incident and vulnerability response times improved by using ServiceNow Security Operations by as much as 50%.

In addition to automation of manual processes, Forrester also found Security Operations helped the composite organization:

• consolidate alerts from multiple security tools on a single platform
• quickly map security incidents and vulnerabilities to IT infrastructure
• prioritize and resolve the most critical security incidents and vulnerabilities first

The composite organization was able to do much more with the same amount of staff by working efficiently. It was also able to more closely collaborate with IT counterparts, which is especially beneficial for vulnerability response, where coordination is critical to successful patch management.

Overall security visibility improved through the use of real-time dashboards. Security Operations can even help with gathering team performance metrics so you can prove your team’s value, not just the value of ServiceNow.

Based on this data uncovered by Forrester, ServiceNow put together a value calculator for Security Operations. This interactive calculator lets you input data specific to your organization, including size, number of security incidents and vulnerabilities, and time spent on resolution, to get real-world savings estimates.

Read the full study to learn about the benefits you can experience by using ServiceNow Security Operations, including projected three-year savings and return on investment. Download The Total Economic Impact™ of ServiceNow Security Operations.

[1] Ponemon Institute Cost of a Data Breach Study, 2017